Hiring Turnaround Leaders
Hiring Turnaround Leaders
The U.S. Department of Education is urging high-quality charter school organizations with strong records of success to pursue opportunities to turn around schools failing in the traditional systems. About $3.5 billion, made up of $546 million in Title I School Improvement Grants and $3 billion under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is targeted to support rigorous interventions in the lowest performing schools nationwide to improve student achievement significantly. Four models for turnaround have been described in the Obama administration’s A Blueprint for Reform: The Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act:
- Transformation model, in which the principal is replaced, the staff is strengthened, a research-based instructional program is implemented, extended learning time is provided, and new governance and flexibility are implemented
- Turnaround model, in which the principal is replaced and no more than 50 percent of the school staff is rehired, a research-based instructional program is implemented, extended learning time is provided, and a new governance structure is implemented
- Restart model, in which states convert a school or close and reopen the school under the management of an effective charter operator, charter management organization, or education management organization
- School closure model, in which the school is closed and its students are enrolled in other higher performing schools in the district
According to the Blueprint for Reform, school districts and their partners can apply for "three-year awards to fully and effectively implement one of these models and will be eligible for two additional years of funding to support a school’s ongoing improvement if the school is showing progress."
Charter school organizations must decide whether they will take on management roles under the turnaround effort. Some charter school organizations will not apply for the grant because it is different when compared with the traditional charter school model, which is to start new, grow slowly, and operate autonomously in exchange for accountability. Other charter organizations already have taken on the new management roles. Charter school organizations that do pursue work under the Restart model will need to put a strong focus on hiring the right leader.
Will Charter School Organizations Take on the Traditional School Turnaround Work?
Don Feinstein is a former Chicago Public Schools principal and now the executive director of the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL), a training program for turnaround teachers and principals for traditional urban schools. AUSL started its one-year academy program in 2001 and has graduated more than 300 people and managed 12 school turnarounds for Chicago Public Schools, according to the organization’s website. Feinstein said the movement of charter school management organizations to take on traditional school turnarounds has been "slow to fruition." "I don’t see many takers," Feinstein said. "The demand is there," he said. "It’s the supply side where we have a problem."
Some charter school organizations, however, are interested in turning around low-performing schools. Mastery Charter Schools, in Philadelphia, has taken on turnarounds of the low-performing traditional public schools. Mastery Charter Schools started its work four years ago with the School District of Philadelphia. Today, Mastery Charter Schools operates four schools in a partnership with the School District of Philadelphia, three of which Mastery Charter Schools took over as turnaround projects. Mastery Charter Schools plans to turn around three more schools, all School District of Philadelphia elementary schools, next year, according to its Chief Executive Officer Scott Gordon. "We believe if you have the right system and the right people, kids are kids, and we can be successful," said Gordon, who in 2009 urged Congress to support such initiatives and to focus on outcomes and not the process.
Ben Rayer, chief charter, partnership, and new schools officer for the School District of Philadelphia until resigning from the position July 19, said in an interview before his departure that seven schools will be administered by charter organizations next year. These schools are half of the schools in the district that qualified as the lowest performing 5 percent. The others will be run by an offshoot of the district. Rayer, former president of Mastery Charter Schools, said the choice of who would administer the schools was left to community councils that were started this year and reviewed proposals from organizations that were qualified by the school district. Parents must comprise at least 51 percent of the councils.
In Washington, D.C., three D.C. Public Schools system high schools are managed by charter school organizations; Friends of Bedford, Inc. manages two of the schools, and the other school is managed by Friendship Public Charter, Inc. In New Orleans, the role of charter schools has rapidly expanded. The Recovery School District (RSD) was created in 2003 to improve underperforming public schools and is administered by the Louisiana Department of Education. The number of schools managed directly by the RSD remains at 22, whereas the number of charters increased from 17 to 46, according to RSD Chief of Staff Siona LaFrance. "Every school in our district can be classified as a turnaround school," LaFrance said in an e-mail. "As we’ve moved forward, we are converting previous direct-run schools to charter schools."
Even though numerous groups are entering this type of work, not all charter school organizations plan to enter this arena. For example, KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), one of the most prominent charter school organizations, has no plans to seek turnaround work in the traditional school system in the coming year. Steve Mancini, KIPP’s national director of public affairs, said the school network, which has its own, yearlong leadership training program, will "stick to its knitting" and focus all of its energy on the growth of KIPP schools, about 18 more of which are planned for 2010–11. "We decided that we’re going to stay disciplined and focus on where we’ve had success growing in a different way," Mancini said.
What Does It Take to Be a Turnaround Leader?
For charter school organizations taking on turnaround projects, a critical challenge lies ahead in finding the right leader to do the work. Researchers and leaders in the turnaround field have identified key characteristics of turnaround leaders. Research has suggested that many of the characteristics of successful turnaround leaders in business also make sense for school leaders, whether they are related to charter school start-ups or traditional school turnarounds. Turnaround leaders set high goals and pursue them relentlessly. Early goals may be few and limited in order to achieve quick successes, but this is not an end in itself. It is a way to show the school community what achievement looks like and energize people to keep meeting higher and higher goals.
It is critical that turnaround leaders be able to collect and analyze important data that identify strengths and weaknesses of the school and then use the findings to formulate and implement specific improvement plans. For example, if data on student performance are not clearly understood, it is that much more difficult to direct resources where they are needed and to show improvement that will motivate better performance.
School turnaround leaders must be able to assess their staff and replace people who are not performing or adapting to change. That process may not necessarily involve wholesale changes in staff. It may involve only replacing key senior staff with people who can quickly deepen the influence of the leader and help identify and remove staff who will resist the changes needed for school turnaround.
Turnaround leaders must have the self-confidence and stamina to make difficult or unpopular decisions and to follow through with their decision. Self-confidence also is important in positively influencing others and in developing and openly communicating the vision for the school and the expected results.
In a school setting, getting those results means navigating not only the complex environment within the school walls but also the broader community of parents, community leaders, and government officials. For example, School Turnarounds: Action and Results, a 2008 report from the Center on Innovation & Improvement, highlighted an action showing the importance of addressing issues outside the school. The head of a New England school that had lost its accreditation after major budget cuts marshaled parents to lobby the school district for additional funds to hire the staff needed to turn around the school successfully.
"Turnaround is a lot of chaos," said Richard O’Neill, president of Renaissance School Services and a former executive at Edison Schools. It takes a unique person with a wide-ranging set of skills to lead a school turnaround successfully. O’Neill said that there is desperate need for school improvement, and he seeks competent people with drive, a strong work ethic, integrity, and the ability to see the path amid the chaos and inspire people to take the path. Margaret Harrington, chief operating officer of the Victory Schools charter network, said: "You can’t just be an instruction person."
Tools Are Available to Help Assess Turnaround Leader Candidates
The U.S. Department of Education says that there are 5,000 underperforming schools across the country that need to be turned around. School leaders to carry out this work are in high demand. But because there are so few people who have actually led a successful school turnaround, administrators must consider other types of candidates who don’t have a turnaround track record. The right person may be an assistant principal who has shown potential in one section of school operations or a highly effective teacher with ambition to run a school. In other words, the perfect candidate may not be available. Useful tools are available, however, to help people who are charged with hiring turnaround leaders identify the best candidates.
Lucy M. Steiner, a senior consultant at Public Impact, which is a national education policy and management consulting firm based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, says more research is needed to better understand the dynamics of school turnaround leader performance. Steiner indicates that research has defined key competencies, those underlying "consistent patterns of thinking, feeling, acting and speaking" that tend to predict success. Knowledge and skills, continues Steiner, are more readily identifiable than the deeper leadership competencies. The four competencies are as follows: driving for results, influencing for results, problem solving, and showing confidence to lead. The competencies, according to Steiner, were drawn from observation of effective leadership across sectors, such as private business and the military. The competencies are discussed in detail in a guide from Public Impact titled School Turnaround Leaders: Competencies for Success.
The guide includes sample scenarios that show the gradations of how the competencies manifest themselves. For example, regarding achievement, candidates in the "neutral zone" on the assessment matrix might have the specific behavior of improving their own work or the work of a team, but not in the pursuit of a specific goal. That compares with a "potential hire," who fits in the "superior zone" by exhibiting the specific behavior of taking a significant career risk to launch a new venture, planning carefully, and engaging others for success.
Public Impact has produced a companion guide titled School Turnaround Leaders: Selection Toolkit. The toolkit includes candidate scoring sheets, interview techniques, and sample interview questions and responses to help identify the competencies. The focus of the toolkit is to provide methods to get beyond generalities and elicit from turnaround leader job candidates detailed information about their past work and thought process.
On June 2, Steiner led a webinar for the Resource Center that covered the competencies. According to Steiner, it takes a deliberate effort to screen for the competencies in what is called a Behavioral Event Interview, but it is worth the investment.
"There is a huge benefit to hiring the right people if they are going to be successful in the job," said Steiner. The screening can be simplified to focus on the two most important competencies, which she said are the drive to achieve and the capacity to influence others.
LeAnn Buntrock, executive director of the University of Virginia’s School Turnaround Specialists Program, indicated that the national infrastructure to support training and selecting school turnaround leaders needs to be strengthened. "There are people out there who want to do this work…. We need to do a better job finding them and selecting them," said Buntrock.
NEWS
National Charter Conference Draws 4,100, Closes With Leadership Changes. About 4,100 people attended the 2010 National Charter Schools Conference in Chicago that ended July 1 after four intensive days that included a keynote speech from Bill Gates, the induction of three educators into the Hall of Fame, myriad discussion panels, and the transfer of leadership of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Alliance Chief Executive Officer and President Nelson Smith, the organization’s first director and a member of the Resource Center advisory board, turned over the reins he has held for five years to Peter Groff, a long-time charter school supporter and veteran of the Colorado legislature.
Alliance governing board chairman Caprice Young, president and chief executive officer of KC Distance Learning Inc., was succeeded by Mashea Ashton, who is a Newark Charter School Fund partner and also a Resource Center advisory board member.
Parents of Special Needs Students Want Schools’ "Embrace". When it comes to school choice, perhaps the choosiest of parents are those of children with special needs, and they don’t particularly care whether the school is a charter school or a traditional public school, according to Kelly Hupfeld of the University of Colorado Denver’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, who conducted survey research on the issue in Denver and Milwaukee.
Parents' chief concern is finding a good fit and feeling that their child will be embraced. "What came through strongest was the crush of responsibility that parents felt to get this right," Hupfeld said, speaking about her research at a forum May 24 in Washington, D.C. "What they want is a school that will embrace their child." The challenge of providing that embrace in the charter school community was the forum’s focus. Hupfeld was part of a discussion led by Robin Lake of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington in Seattle. The event, held at the Charles Sumner School, was organized around research on the topic collected in a new book Lake edited: Unique Schools Serving Unique Students: Charter Schools and Children With Special Needs. The work by Hupfeld and her two collaborators is among the research in the book.
Issues discussed at the forum included the importance of knowing how the laws regarding the provision of special education work, methods to assure accountability, and ways to pool resources and risk.
EVENTS
September 27–28: Supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through the Ohio Grantmakers Forum, the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the Denver Public Schools are hosting a national conference in Columbus, Ohio, to showcase best cooperative practices between charter and traditional public schools. The conference will collect, exhibit, and publish 50 cooperative and innovative practices from across the country that demonstrate how traditional districts and charters work together to leverage their strengths in the areas of instruction and curriculum, performance management, dropout prevention, operations, career and college readiness, facilities, transportation, extracurricular activities, and conditions for learning.
RESOURCES
School Turnaround Leaders: Competencies for Success. This report from Public Impact outlines the most critical competencies for turnaround school leaders, including definitions of key skills, school examples, and detailed levels of increasingly effective competence.
School Turnaround Leaders: Selection Toolkit. This report from Public Impact is a guide to the process for hiring school turnaround leaders and includes interviewing techniques, candidate rating and comparison, and a listing of actions that are shown consistently as part of effective turnarounds.
Turnarounds With New Leaders and Staff: School Restructuring Options Under No Child Left Behind: What Works When? This paper from Learning Point Associates, produced by the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory with funds from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, with support from the U.S. Department of Education, focuses on replacing school leaders and staff in the context of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and includes a historical perspective as well as practical information about school turnarounds.
The Big U-Turn: How to Bring Schools From the Brink of Doom to Stellar Success. This Education Next article by Public Impact codirectors Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel identifies six leadership strategies that recur in successful school turnarounds.
A Cautionary Tale: School Turnarounds and Charter Leadership. This chapter in the National Charter School Research Project Center on Reinventing Public Education’s 2009 Hopes, Fears, & Reality report concludes that a "transformative leader who can drive key changes" is a key to successful turnaround efforts.
U.S. Department of Education, School Turnarounds: Doing What Works. This U.S. Department of Education website provides information about actions that result in school improvement.
Keys to Sustaining Successful School Turnarounds. This report by Daniel L. Duke, a professor in the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education, covers what is revealed from school turnaround case studies.
Mass Insight Education, School Turnaround Group. The School Turnaround Group has done extensive research about school turnaround. The sweeping need for school turnaround indicates that neither incremental change within districts nor abandoning the existing school system will be effective. The group says hybrid, flexible approaches are needed.
The Turnaround Challenge: Supplement to the Main Report. This 2007 report from Mass Insight delves into school districts’ use of outside education management organizations to oversee underperforming schools. It includes details about school reform and improvement efforts in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.
School Turnarounds: Actions and Results. This report from the Center on Innovation & Improvement provides vignettes illustrating what successful school leaders have done to turn around low-performing schools.
School Turnaround. Gillian Williams, founder and chief academic officer of School Turnaround, speaks about how leadership drives improvement. School Turnaround is a program of the Rensselaer Institute in Rensselaer, New York.
